Gwynfor Evans

12:05AM BST 22 Apr 2005

Gwynfor Evans, the former President of Plaid Cymru, who died yesterday aged 92, was the first member of his party to be elected to Parliament and possibly the only person to have persuaded Mrs Thatcher to execute a policy U-turn.

Evans's victory in the Carmarthen by-election of 1966, held after the death of the Labour MP Dame Megan Lloyd George, shocked the Labour political establishment, and there were fears that the days of the party's dominance in Wales might be numbered. This led to a series of concessions to Welsh nationalist sentiment, culminating, long after Evans had retired from national politics, in the establishment of a Welsh assembly in 1998. But Plaid Cymru never gained more than a foothold at Westminster and remains a minority party in the Principality.

Shy, introverted and thin-skinned, Evans was the first to admit he was not really cut out for the rough and tumble of Westminster, a place he saw as "the very symbol of the complete subjugation of Wales, the most mighty manifestation of the Englishness which is killing our country". He lost his seat in 1970, regained it in October 1974, then lost it again in 1979, never to return.

Yet Evans achieved as much, possibly more, outside Parliament as he did inside. In 1980 he announced his intention to "fast to the death" if the new Conservative government did not reverse its decision to renege on a manifesto pledge to establish a Welsh language television channel.

Evans viewed the whole of Welsh history since the 16th century in terms of a deliberate and sustained English policy of wiping out the Welsh language and culture, and saw the government's decision as part of this historic vendetta.

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At first, his threat was received as just another piece of Celtic rhetoric; but Evans was not in good health, and his prospective martyrdom in a period of steel closures and rising unemployment alarmed the government's supporters. Six weeks before he was due to begin his fast, Mrs Thatcher backed down and gave the go-ahead for the creation of S4C. Evans hailed the decision as "the biggest victory we have ever won for the Welsh language".

Gwynfor Evans, the son of a shopkeeper, was born at Barry, Glamorgan, on September 12 1912. His family had little interest in nationalism and did not speak Welsh - Evans began to learn the language only when he was 18. The most important influence on his life was his grandfather, Ben Evans, a Nonconformist minister at the local "tabernacl", from whom Gwynfor imbibed a deep religious conviction (he would become a lay preacher and Sunday school teacher) and life-long teetotalism.

Although a sickly child, Gwynfor went on to play hockey and cricket for Barry County School. He read Law at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he joined the Christian Society and the Left Book Club. Increasingly angered by the suffering he saw during the Depression, he became convinced that Wales, as a community, was disintegrating and that only independence could save the Welsh identity. He joined Plaid Cymru in his final year and, after moving to Oxford to continue his studies at St John's College, he established a branch of the party there.

Evans served his articles in a solicitor's office in Cardiff while continuing his political activities. At the party's conference in 1937 he proposed a motion calling for official status for the Welsh language, and the following year, as war loomed, successfully proposed a motion calling on the party to renounce violence.

Evans regarded the war as essentially English, since "the Welsh had no freedom as a nation that its people could be called upon to defend". At the outbreak of war, he declared himself a conscientious objector. To his surprise, the conscientious objectors' tribunal granted him an unconditional discharge from having to go into the armed forces, a privilege granted to very few. But feeling that it was unseemly to go on working in a solicitor's office while so many of his contemporaries were risking their lives, he decided to grow tomatoes. His father had bought a farmhouse at Llangadog, Carmarthenshire, where he had erected some greenhouses. There, Evans set up his tomato-growing business.

During the war he served as secretary of the Welsh pacifist movement, a commitment which earned him the hostility of his neighbours, the two nephews of Llewellyn Williams, the former MP for Carmarthenshire: "Their sacrifice was made by producing food for Britain and making a profit out of it," Evans observed bitterly. "But they were great Liberals of course."

In 1945 he became president of Plaid Cymru, and in 1949 was elected to Carmarthenshire Council, where he remained for a quarter of a century, for most of the time in a minority of one. He played an energetic role on the county's highways committee, serving as its chairman in 1973 and becoming known as "Gwynfor dual carriageway" on account of his emphasis on the need for better roads. He stood unsuccessfully as a parliamentary candidate for Merioneth before being adopted as candidate for Carmarthen in 1964.

Evans spearheaded campaigns for a Welsh government and language, and against plans to flood the village of Cwm Celyn, near Bala, to create a reservoir to serve the needs of Liverpool. Although he failed to stop the reservoir opening in 1965, his high profile helped in his campaign to become the first Plaid Cymru MP.

"Evans the vote", as he had become known, began his parliamentary career promisingly. Raising a point of order as he was about to take the loyal oath, he asked to be allowed to take it in Welsh. Although the Speaker, brandishing Erskine May, turned him down, his protest led to the setting up of a working party which amended the rules. Evans's presence in parliament, and fears of a Welsh nationalist revival, persuaded Harold Wilson's government in 1967 to pass the Welsh Language Act.

But Evans was never comfortable in the House of Commons, whose "smug English character weighed hard on my spirits", and where he faced continual barracking and animosity from Welsh Labour MPs. His forte was the written question, of which he tabled no fewer than 600 in his first year, earning some protests from government departments.

The late 1960s were difficult for Evans and his party. The opening of the Tryweryn reservoir and the impending investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969 (Evans saw the timing as an attempt by the English authorities to inflict maximum harm on Plaid Cymru) were accompanied by a wave of violence by more extreme elements of Welsh nationalism, and the second half of 1969 saw Evans's support slipping away. He was not helped by the involvement, the following year, of his daughter Meinir in disturbances organised by the Welsh Language Society. In 1970 he lost his seat.

Evans returned to parliament in October 1974 in the company of two other Plaid Cymru MPs, Dafydd Wigley and Dafydd Ellis Thomas (now Lord Ellis Thomas of Nant Conwy). Yet their arrival did little to dispel his sense of isolation.

On one occasion, the three MPs repaired to the members' dining room after a bibulous reception at the Welsh Office: "The two Dafydds displayed their friendly personalities, and their release from the shackles of convention and class by taking on their laps the young woman who waited on us," Evans recorded. At dinner the next evening, the waitress observed: "You was in an awful state last night, wasn't you, Mr Evans?" "I had to put up with tribulations like that only too often," Evans the abstainer recalled.

But the strength of nationalism in Wales and in Scotland persuaded the Labour government of the need for further concessions; these included the setting up of the Welsh Development Agency and a bill to provide compensation for quarrymen suffering from silicosis. It also drafted a devolution bill that would have given both countries their own assemblies - but made its passage dependent on the outcome of a referendum. "Our rejection of that clause had to be masked because it would have been an admission of weakness," Evans admitted. The outcome of the 1978 referendum, in which four times as many Welsh voted against devolution as in favour, was a tremendous set-back for the nationalist cause.

Having lost his seat in 1979, Evans stepped down as president of Plaid Cymru two years later. Though he stood, again unsuccessfully, for Carmarthen in 1983, his energies turned increasingly to writing. He wrote several books about Wales and an autobiography, Bywyd Cymro (1982), published in English as For the Sake of Wales in 1996.

Gwynfor Evans married, in 1941, Rhiannon Prys Thomas; they had four sons and three daughters.